Sears tops mobile commerce index, again

Sears Holdings Inc. may have found the right recipe for reaping the best performance from the mobile commerce site for its Sears brand. For the ninth week in a row, Sears tops the Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index. Toolfetch.com also held onto its No. 2 spot in the index, for the week ending Nov. 20.

Sears had a load time of 3.65 seconds and a success rate of 97.41%. That bested Toolfetch.com’s load time of 4.76 seconds and its 96.54% success rate, Keynote says.

“Sears continues to reign this week topping the index as retailers prepare for the onslaught of traffic that Black Friday will bring,” says Abelardo Gonzalez, mobile performance expert at mobile and web performance management firm Keynote Systems Inc. “The upcoming Black Friday traffic will stress both the carrier data networks and retailers’ mobile sites as well. Sites that are better designed to provide a leaner experience will have a better chance to service users during this heavy traffic period."

Walmart.com, the online unit of Walmart Stores Inc., moved up four positions to the No. 3 spot, followed by Walgreens Co. at No. 4, down one rank from the week prior. Best Buy Co. Inc. remained in the No. 5 position in the index.

Big movers last week include Victoria’s Secret moving up seven positions to No. 7 in the index and Office Deport Inc.’s placement at No. 11, an improvement over its No. 16 position the week prior.

The index average load time was 10.64 seconds, the average success rate was 95.14% and the average score was 722.

Click here and then click on Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index Part 1 and Part 2 to see this week’s complete results for all 30 retailers on the index.

Keynote Systems measures 30 representative m-commerce sites exclusively for Internet Retailer. The sites include merchants in various categories and channels, and of various sizes, ranging from such giants as Amazon.com Inc., Sears Holdings Corp. and 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., to midsized retailers like Sunglass Hut and Toolfetch.com LLC. Keynote tests the sites in the index every hour Monday through Sunday from 8 a.m. through midnight Eastern time, emulating four different smartphones on four different wireless networks: Apple Inc.’s iPhone 4 on AT&T, the HTC Evo on Sprint, the BlackBerry Curve on T-Mobile and the Droid X on Verizon. The HTC Evo and the Droid X run Google Inc.’s Android operating system. It runs the tests in Chicago, Dallas, New York and San Francisco.

Keynote combines a site’s load time and success rate, equally weighted, into a single score. Given that both performance and availability are important, the score reflects the overall quality of the home page; a higher score indicates better performance. Scores also reflect how close sites are to each other in overall quality. The index average score is the midpoint among all the sites’ scores.